Edvard Munch painted his first Scream in 1893, when he was 30 years old. It is the work by which he is universally recognised and lately, measured, not least in pecuniary terms. But for a work of art to become a totem is as much a hindrance as a help. Over the years it has obscured Munch’s other achievements. He may be the most well-known of artists, but he is the least understood.

In 1893, Munch was already an established, if controversial, artist in his hometown of Oslo, or Kristiania as it was called at the time. He would live for another 50 years. When he died of pneumonia in winter 1944, he left to the state of Oslo a collection of 1,008 paintings, 4,443 drawings and 15,391 prints, etchings, lithographs and woodcuts. Today they are stored in a maze of temperature-controlled vaults under Oslo’s Munch Museum. Munch had a penchant for leaving his paintings outside in the snow, so a good portion of the works require the attentions of restorers, who hang over the horizontal canvases Mission: Impossible style, suspended by a harness.

With this gargantuan archive in mind, an exhibition opening at London’s Tate Modern this month is going to be rather a tap on the wrist. Designed in collaboration with the Munch Museum, it will widen our view of the world’s favourite Norwegian (Ibsen, Grieg and now Nesbø are close behind).

Posterity declares Munch angst-ridden, depressed. But nothing could be further from the truth. His friend Hugo Perls described him as “a wonderful man! Capable of the heartiest laughter”. Posterity thinks him introspective. Also wrong. His painting is engaged with the world around him. He often painted what he’d read about in the press. He was so outward-looking, in fact, that in his 60 years as an artist, he never stopped experimenting with new technologies.

It is this last aspect that is the most intriguing, and the Tate show will include a rare airing of his photographs and films. Munch belonged to a generation of artists whose imagination was profoundly marked by the advent of the mechanical image. Both as a young man and again when he was much older, he wrestled with early prototype cameras to produce 244 photographs of 183 different subjects.

While many painters used photography in one way or another around this time — Degas, Bonnard, Mucha, Vuillard, Denis, Valloton were all keen — Munch went far beyond using the camera as an alternative to preliminary sketches. One of his journal entries reads: “The wish — is for the painter to see like a camera.” Firstly, his were eminently autobiographical. We see him in his worsted suit and tie, surrounded by his paintings – he referred to them as his “children”. Sometimes he is naked in the garden of his summer cottage (not as unusual a pastime as it may sound), or posing like a Greek statue in the guise of heroic artist. He photographs his face from one angle then another; his shadow as it strokes the stocking-clad legs of two female companions. He stares at himself, relishing these moments of self-observation. He cannot get enough.

Secondly, early cameras were riddled with defects. Lenses stretched distances, making pictures look distorted. Purists hated these effects, but they delighted and enthralled Munch, who used them to add drama to his art. In his paintings the diagonal lines are dizzyingly steep and he deliberately expands the space between what is near and far to add drama.

Beyond his own experimentations he was an avid consumer of other photographs. Fellow artist Ludvig Ravensberg recalled Munch’s living room as littered with magazines – his archive at the Munch Museum contains stacks of them.

Crowds were one of the great visual motifs of the early press. Between the marches by strikers and the mobilisation of soldiers, opportunities to photograph them were legion. They were also a favourite subject for early cinema, alongside galloping horses and sea waves. Figures moving towards the camera showed what film was capable of.

Unsurprisingly, Munch loved it. Two of his most important pictures – Galloping Horse and Workers on Their Way Home — make full use of cinema. They are filled with flickers and shadows, the bodies foreshortened so they lean forward towards the viewer. In the Workers, the figures are painted from several different angles — we are seeing the crowd as it moves, turning our heads as they pass before our eyes.

We know Munch went to the cinema. He sometimes took his dogs. He also took his motorboat and putted up and down the coast to the smaller towns, making sure he watched every newsreel, every Chaplin. In 1927 he purchased his own cine-camera — a Pathé “Baby”.

Only 5min 17sec of Munch’s footage survive. He follows pedestrians, then a tram and a passing car. He watches a woman at the corner of the street then follows her for a few moments. He asks one friend to walk in front of the camera, steals up on his aunt and sister. Then he puts the camera down and leans in front, towards the lens. It’s as if he is trying to see its insides.